Perihelion Interactive announces The Mandate, a six player cooperative space RPG set in a world torn apart by 1500 years of war. From a newly formed development house featuring some of the creative minds from Funcom’s most popular MMO’s, and Ubisoft’ s original Assassins Creed, Perihelion Interactive collaborate to create a truly unique RPG experience with influences from some of the most tactically rich strategy and RPG titles of the past.

“We’ve enjoyed dozens of sci-fi RPGs over the years, but we always thought they lacked a certain something,” explains Ole Herbjornsen, founder of Perihelion Interactive. “We just weren’t sure what. Then, while thumbing through our collection of favourite movies and TV shows, the answer struck us. In great shows like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica or Firefly, the drama comes not from the ships but from the crew members – their hopes, their fears, their rivalries, their relationships. A ship without a crew feels hollow, meaningless.”

Yourself and up to five other players will explore the dark reaches of space, which mix hand-crafted and procedurally generated content with historically relevant easter-eggs offering insight into the Mandate's rich lore. Perihelion Interactive have not only focused on space exploration, but also human exploration – the bond between captain and ship, crew and officers.

Fight, quest, trade, scavenge, and upgrade your way to victory!

In a unique turn for the genre, relationships between captain, crew, and officers will directly affect battle situations, and with rogue-like elements, officers trained over time can be lost – literally vented out through the side of your ship - which will suffer irreparable radioactive and other atmospheric cosmetic and detrimental effects, rendered in DirectX11 on the Unity Engine for PC, with a release schedule for Mac and Linux too.

For the first time in the strategy RPG genre, players will orchestrate boarding operations isometrically in the vein of X-Com and Jagged Alliance, while your friends support you in real time from their ships. If more manpower is required, they can join you in boarding the enemy vessel, allowing you to switch back to your ship and offer them support – or you can fight together and double your numbers.

“One rule, no quarter”

Strongly inspired by the ethos of 18th century Russian history and literature, the world of The Mandate sees a dystopian Tsarist future, ruled by bureaucracy – with an iron hammer. As a disgraced captain, you’ve to leave your past behind you and face the unbeatable threat of The Mandate, gaining as much control over each sector of space as you can, undertaking quests, trading, and fortifying your assets; build Star Bases, and create allegiances with one of the many factions in the game, inspired by many other European and global cultures.

The Kickstarter campaign launches on the 3rd of October, but Perihelion Interactive has prepared the games theme, recorded under a live orchestra, with multi-lingual voice over, in Russian, English and Spanish.

You can check out the trailer on YouTube.

There’s a character creator, or ‘life-path’ system demo on the way, and also a ship design and combat simulator which will be sent out during the Kickstarter campaign, allowing you to design and destroy your own ship! Dates are TBD. The ship designer for non-pledgers is available on the website, here.

About Perihelion Interactive
Founded in 2013 by a team of internationally based veteran game developers, Perihelion Interactive’s first project is the science fiction RPG The Mandate. Members of the Perihelion team have previously worked on projects including Assassin's Creed 1 and 2, Mafia 2, Far Cry 2, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures and The Secret World.